It Hurts Down Here on Earth, Lord
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: Jimmy has this whole zombie apocalypse thing on lockdown. He doesn't need some librarian type drinking his booze and giving him sass all day, that's for sure. There's no way that could possibly be helpful in any scenario, definitely not. Mmy/Edgar, pre-slash.


A present for Jynx. Weirdly enough I think this is the most canon-relevant Edgar I've ever written.

You all knew I was going to have to do one of these AUs eventually right? It picks up just before Edgar would have been kidnapped in the cannon timeline.

* * *

Well it hurts down here on Earth Lord, it hurts down here on Earth,  
It hurts down here 'cause we're running out of beer  
But we're all gonna die some day!

-Casey Chambers

Jimmy, who had been considering changing his name for a while now, was the sole defender of the last enclave of civilization in this brave new world. Anyways, that was how he liked to put it in his head—the truth was he was pretty sure there were like a dozen other scraggly groups of survivors holed up just inside the city limits. He'd heard gunshots coming from inside the mall a couple days ago, so unless walkers had recently figured out how to shoot, it was a pretty fair bet somebody was living in there.

The Last Enclave of Civilization in This Brave New World happened to be a convenience store in the middle of downtown. It was pretty much the ultimate in post-apocalyptic gourmet—hostess cakes, soda, beer, twizzlers—and it was closed in on three sides by the neighboring, much taller buildings. All you had to do was keep the shambling dicks out your front door, and you were set. Since the convenience store came with bars on the windows and everything, you pretty much couldn't go wrong.

Jimmy had been pretty pissed drunk for a good day or so, but he'd misplaced the beer (all of it) in the middle of his giggling stupor, and he'd been nursing a bitch of a hangover for most of the morning in consequence. The current plan was to wait out the headache long enough to stand without keeling over and then go look for more beer.

This stubborn lack of foresight characterized most of Jimmy's plans.

He was starting in on phase two of that plan when what remained of his life changed forever. There was a knock at the window.

Jimmy squinted across the candy isle towards the barred opening, past the partially shattered glass, and out onto the mild-looking face of what was apparently another human being. Knocking. On his window.

"I don't want to sound pushy," the man called out, "but if you could let me before I'm eviscerated I'd really _appreciate_ that."

Jimmy looked down at the lone beer bottle he'd managed to uncover—stashed in the bargain-bin candy barrel, under those orange peanuts nobody ever eats—then climbed over the top of the isle and kicked his way to the door. A can of soda exploded in his wake. He pushed it open and yanked the stranger inside.

"Thanks," the guy said, adjusting his round glasses. There was a miniscule speck of blood on the lens.

Jimmy shoved him up against a wall. The fact that he had roughly two inches on Jimmy and could probably kick his ass in a fair fight was apparently deemed irrelevant.

"Are you infected?" Jimmy demanded; his forearm formed half a vice around the guy's neck. "Did they bite you? Any open wounds?"

"Not that I'm aware of," the man replied, a little amused.

Jimmy jerked him forward and spun him around, running his hands up under the sports jacket and down the sleeves in search of something sticky and red. No gaping wounds here, or there… not even a paper cut. Jimmy slunk back a few inches, defeated.

"Well that was… interesting. I would have taken my jacket off if you'd asked," the man told him, and proceeded to do just that. "Did that serve a purpose or is it just your way of getting acquainted?"

Jimmy shrugged, half sulking. "I was hoping you'd be one of those guys who gets infected and tries to hide it. There's one in every movie. I was gonna cap you and get a leg up on the script."

"Ah," the stranger responded. "And here I thought you were going to take me to prom."

"What?"

"Yes that's about what I was thinking. My name's Edgar. Edgar Vargas." He thrust out his hand, like a punctuation.

"Uh. Jimmy," the younger man (at least he estimated he was the younger of the two) replied. "You sure you're not infected? Not even a little bit?"

Edgar patted him on the shoulder. "Don't worry," he said, "with a winning attitude like that, I'm sure you'll find some other reason to kill me soon enough."

"Uh."

But Edgar had already moseyed on past him and was evaluating the room quadrant by quadrant, thumb rubbing idly at the goatee on his almost preternaturally square jaw. There was something about him—thin and angled—that brought to mind a particularly square implement of stainless steel French cutlery. Jimmy had been working on a knife the week before that could have been his cousin.

"So you're living here?" Edgar asked him without turning, arms crossed in front of him. "The water still works?"

"Of course it does," Jimmy snapped. "What kinda dumb question is that?"

"The kind that serves as a prelude to another. Is there a shower of some kind?"

The younger man scowled. "Yeah, so?"

"So can I use it?" Edgar asked him, finally turning around. "Not to impose, but I've been wandering the streets for more than a day now and you can imagine I'm a little… grimy."

Jimmy considered this. On the one hand, it wasn't like he was using the shower. He didn't actually know why they had one, except that he was pretty sure the previous owner had been harboring illegal immigrants in the back room. On the other hand, though, why should he let this random motherfucker use it? This was his place. His fort. His castle. The stronghold of his—

"Great, thank you, I'll only be a minute."

Wait had he been nodding or something? Why was this bastard walking towards the backroom _he didn't remember saying yes._

The door clicked closed on Jimmy while his mouth was still half open in a silent syllable.

Then it popped back open.

Edgar peered back out, his glasses flashing white in the dimness. "You wouldn't happen to be coming along, would you?"

"_What_? Why would I do that?"

Edgar lifted his dark eyebrows. "It would be a prime opportunity to inspect for bite wounds, that's all."

And then he closed the door behind him once and for all.

-x-

When Edgar reappeared ten minutes later, he was already half dressed and pulling on his t-shirt. In the span of that ten minutes Jimmy had discovered about half his stash of disappeared beer—in the crate of those same candy peanuts that nobody ever eats, which begged the question of why anybody would ever order a crate of it—and raided the back of the counter for such novelties as scratch-off cards, condoms, cigarettes, condoms, skeezy magazines, and of course, condoms. He had a feeling these condoms were not actually for sale. He pocketed them anyway.

Not for any particular reason.

In any case, he was scratching off lotto cards with his fingernails when Edgar came striding out of the backroom, lingering water slipping down the sharp panels of his face. He seemed interested in the haphazard pile of bottles at Jimmy's feet.

"Could I have a beer?" he asked, running a hand through the near-black hair that hung longer around the crown of his head.

"No," Jimmy snapped. He took a showy swig of his own and came up coughing. Too much show. Ow.

"Okay," Edgar replied, placidly. He settled himself in a space of floor beside Jimmy, hands folded in his lap.

Expectant silence hung over them for the most agonizing sixty seconds of Jimmy's fairly short life. Finally he let out a noise halfway between a sigh and a growl and shoved one of the cheaper bottles at Edgar's chest.

"Here," he said. "I shoulda stabbed you when I was thinking about it."

"Not shoot?"

Jimmy wrinkled his nose and looked sidelong at his companion. "Not what?"

"Shoot," Edgar repeated. "Most people use guns in a scenario like this. Do you kill zombies with a knife too?"

"I kill everybody with a knife," Jimmy replied, flipping his open for emphasis. That was only his butterfly knife, but it was the easiest to get to in a snap. "Can't beat the classics man. You gotta have style if you're gonna play the game. Can't make an exception for walkers or I'll look like a big fake tool."

"Why call them walkers?" Edgar asked.

"Uh."

"It's not like we all haven't seen a zombie movie," Edgar went on, uncapping his beer. "What's the point of making up some new name when we all know they're zombies?"

Jimmy shrugged. "I dunno, I just picked it up from some other guys."

"It's like people just couldn't stand the idea that zombies were happening after all, so they had to make up some new name to make themselves feel better. _Oh, they're not zombies, they're _walkers."

Jimmy shrugged again. "You wanna get technical, unless somebody voodoo'ed the whole town these aren't zombies either."

Edgar gave him an approving look. "Fair enough," he said. "Fair enough."

The long and short of it was that Edgar ended up staying the night. This was largely due to the fact that drunkness and hospitality went hand in hand for Jimmy, but also partly due to the fact that Edgar had that particularly ingratiating quality only the oddest of natures and evenest of tempers can boast. After spending an hour in your house, you become convinced that he must have come free with the furniture.

Although there was a bed in the back room—which had indeed belonged to an illegal immigrant at one point, but also to the CEO of a very large corporation—both men managed to fall asleep on the tile in the energy drink section, with Jimmy snoring into his guest's sternum.

Somewhere outside, an impetus of activity was gathering.

Jimmy was woken up on the tile of the energy drink section too, approximately five hours after falling asleep there. Someone was shaking his shoulder.

"Dauffunggg," he groaned, searching his pockets in that odd jerky way best associated with impaired nervous systems and half-sleeping teenagers. It was fortunate that he didn't manage to locate the thing he was groggily searching for, since the thing in question was a knife and the intent was to stab the nearest breathing thing. This was an instinct distantly related to the habitual slamming of a snooze button in previous stages of life.

His head was killing him _Jesus Christ_ he was dying.

"Jimmy," a voice whispered, firm but respectful of potential hangover. "Wake up."

Jimmy snapped one eye open.

Oh look, there was the angel of death looming over him. He had known this day was coming. He just thought he'd be better armed.

"Jimmy, I don't want to rush you but we're actually having some troubling developments here in the land of the living," the angel of death said, shaking his shoulder again.

Man, Hell was going to be a _bitch_.

"Fuckin'… wish I played fiddled," Jimmy mumbled. "Ten more years, God, gimme ten. Suck a goddamn dick for… ten years…"

There was a sigh, and then the contents of a jumbo water bottle were upended over Jimmy's head.

He was on his feet in about a millisecond after that.

"Oh good," Edgar said. "You're up."

Jimmy spluttered and wiped furiously at his face. "Did you just dump _water on my head?"_

"Yes," Edgar replied.

"I oughta skin you," Jimmy seethed, patting his pockets for that elusive knife. The good ones were in his boots, but his boots were on the other side of the store. "Drink my beer and pour shit on my head, I'll gut your corpse for tendons."

"You can do that later," Edgar offered, conciliatory. "Right now, you might want to check out what's on the other side of the window."

What was on the other side of the window was this: countless pairs of white glazed eyes in the pinkish morning sunlight, crowded around the front of the store, standing there and staring. One small one had his face pressed up against the glass on the door like a kid short on pocket change.

Jimmy stamped his foot. "This is your fault!"

"I don't see why it should be," Edgar remarked, "I've been on the streets for days and I didn't exactly accumulate a posse. Maybe there's something in here they want."

"You mean besides us," Jimmy snarled, already tearing through his backpack to get at his weaponry.

"Maybe there was some kind of commotion last night that attracted them…"

They both turned and regarded the medium sized remains of a very large firecracker lying on the floor. There was a hole in the ceiling.

"Ah," Edgar said, "that would do it."

Jimmy jerked his knife case free and pawed through it for the largest thing he could get his hands on. Oooh, the collapsible. That could work.

"Well," Edgar sighed, still regarding the front of the shop with a cool severity, "where were you planning on going next?"

"Next?" Jimmy echoed, only half-listening.

"After you left this store," the older man elaborated. "Next. Where were you headed?"

"Uh," Jimmy said. "I wasn't."

"You can't tell me you meant to stay here for the rest of your life."

"Well why not? 's got beer and cheetos, what more does a guy need."

"You'll run out of supplies eventually, you know," Edgar noted, while Jimmy fumbled with the triparted blade of his collapsible. "And water. And sooner or later you'll want to walk somewhere. This place is at best waystation material."

"Whatever."

Jimmy heard a rustling and a metallic click above his head, and he spared a moment to look up. Edgar was loading bullets into a fair sized pistol.

"Do you suppose they're intelligent enough to recognize a loaded gun?"

Jimmy barked out a laugh. "Hell, they weren't even that smart before they started rotting."

Edgar made a non-committal noise and strode towards the window. Pink lines of sunlight reflected off the barrel of his gun. The undead mob was distinctly uninterested.

"Well that's disheartening," Edgar noted, and lowered the gun.

"Might as well shoot a couple," Jimmy said, standing up. "Serve the bastards right."

"I've got limited ammo," the older man sighed. "Besides which, I don't kill things."

Although Jimmy was not terribly familiar with the concept of irony outside of "it's like rain on your wedding day", he was pretty sure this had to qualify.

"Lemme get this straight," he said, crossing his arms as best he could with a small sword in his hand. "You've been wandering the streets with a gun for days and you haven't even shot anything?"

Edgar shrugged. "Pacifist."

Jimmy sighed and dragged a hand down one side of his face. "You gotta be kidding me."

"Sorry to disappoint," Edgar said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. "You'll just have to be my knight in shining armor. You've already got the sword bit down I see."

Jimmy looked down at the blade—his own design, not so much a bastard sword as a bastardization of a sword—and dropped his arms. "What makes you think I'm gonna do anything for you?"

"Nothing," Edgar replied, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "My mistake, of course. It's every man for himself here in the last outpost of this brave new world."

"Enclave," Jimmy muttered, turning back to his cases and bags. "It's a goddamn enclave."

"Do you hear squeaking?"

Jimmy looked up. "What?"

"Squeaking. I've been hearing it for the last ten minutes."

"I don't—wait." Jimmy scanned the length of the front for a sign of something amiss. Where the glass was shattered, any number of discolored hands were groping ineffectually at the bars. Where the glass wasn't shattered, big dead frustrated eyes. No sign of anything…

Except there was something going on around the outside of the door.

"Hold on, I'm gonna check that out."

"My hero."

"You shut the fuck up," Jimmy muttered, making his way across the room. There was a tiny mob of the things all pressed up around the door. This would have been a bad sign, except that Jimmy had specifically broken the outside handle off of the door. There was no way they were prying this thing open without a pry bar, and no walker he'd ever seen was smart enough to pick up a tool.

Then he noticed what they were doing.

"Motherfucking holy shit," he said, impressed despite himself. "The little son of a bitch is screwing in a new doorknob."

"What?" Edgar demanded, crossing the floor in half a second flat. "You left the doorknob on the outside of the building?"

"Oh yeah," Jimmy said, "that's the thing you find hard to believe."

The zombies were taking turns with their useless gnarled hands, batting the doorknob around and around in the world's most prolonged screw—there was a joke in there somewhere, but since Jimmy had never actually had sex with a living person he wasn't really sure what time frame to compare it to.

The two of them stood there, observing the belabored efforts.

"Well," Edgar said, clapping his hands together. "I think we've overstayed our welcome."

"We?" Jimmy repeated.

Edgar lifted an eyebrow. "Unless you're planning on _staying_ here."

The younger man glanced back at the door and then stabbed a soda can with his sword in frustration.

"Here's what we're going to do," Edgar said, already making his way back into the recesses of the store. "We take as many bags as we can carry, load up all the supplies we can fit, and then we make a break for it. Is there a back door?"

"No," Jimmy answered. "Just the front. Back wall's up against an insurance company or something."

Edgar paused mid-reach, with his hand half-way to the promotional satchels hanging behind the counter. "That's a bit of a problem," he noted distantly.

Jimmy sized up the mob accumulating outside their hideout. "If we rush the front door we might surprise 'em enough to bust through. You can go first."

"Swoon," Edgar remarked.

"You got a better idea?" Jimmy sniped, whirling away from the front window. In the back of the store, Edgar was stuffing metric pounds of jerky into a shitty tote.

"Maybe…" he hummed. "There's a staircase in one of the backrooms. Where does it lead?"

"To the roof," Jimmy replied. "This building's really short, though, you can't just climb down the back. The building behind us is like twenty stories."

"Perfect," Edgar said.

After that point, the older man was too busy rushing from isle to isle to answer any questions, so Jimmy reluctantly started to pack his backpack with the essentials—cheetos, condoms, oreos, candy bars, condoms, so on and so forth—while Edgar swung by every minute or so to reach down over his shoulder and pop a helpful hole in the baggies for deflation. And also to confiscate Jimmy's beers mid-swig, since "getting you out of here sober is going to be difficult enough".

"Our father who art in heaven—" Edgar was muttering, leaving Jimmy with disjointed snippits of the prayer as he dashed back and forth, "—thy Kingdom come—"

"You religious?" Jimmy called up. The closest he'd ever come to religion was stabbing a preacher's daughter, but something told him now probably wasn't the time to bring that up.

"More so in times of stress," Edgar replied. "Times like these certainly do bring out the inner catholic."

The faint sounds of a doorknob being screwed into place slithered across the floor.

Jimmy was still trying to jam one last pack of oreos into his overfull backpack when Edgar swooped down and grabbed him by the collar, and just about threw him towards the rear door.

"I got a goddamn sword you pushy son of a bitch," Jimmy groused, barely managing to swing the backpack into place before they reached the stairs, "I could cut your head right off."

"Knob's in," Edgar replied, terse, his hands pressed into the small of Jimmy's back, half-pushing him up the staircase. "Talk later."

Since Jimmy was not quite smart enough to feel appropriate fear at that juncture, he instead felt a little inexplicably disappointed that Edgar didn't have some facetious comment at the ready for him. Also he thought that Edgar's hands were more distracting than helpful.

They burst up onto the roof, red-hot adrenaline bombs exploding against the insides of their chests. Edgar immediately made a beeline for the building smashed up against the back of their own.

"Where are you going?" Jimmy demanded, tapping the blunt side of his sword against his jeans.

Edgar stopped at the edge of the roof, where the brick wall of the next building shot off into the sky above them. "Bingo," he said.

"Bingo what?" Jimmy demanded, irritated with being ignored.

"Your inquisitive nature is my favorite thing about you," Edgar said. "This building's got windows. I found us an escape route."

"Wait what was—"

"You look like a guy with breaking and entering experience. Help me bust this thing open."

Jimmy squinted, uncertain is that was a compliment or an insult.

"We're in a bit of a hurry," Edgar observed, holding out a crowbar—where had he been keeping that?

Jimmy frowned and took the proffered instrument of structural coercion. "I still say we outghta killed the whole bunch while we had the chance."

"I don't kill things," Edgar repeated, placidly. "Unlike a certain rugged specimen of streetwise masculinity around here, I suppose I'm simply not cut out for it. I couldn't."

Jimmy, absorbed in his battle with the window, only half heard any of that. He swore at the glass and turned around. "You got a hammer?"

Edgar immediately produced a hammer.

"Couldn't," Jimmy snorted, going to town on the jammed shut window. "How'd I end up in such a goddamn pussy—"

"With."

"What?"

"You said _in_ but I think you meant _with_."

"I'm trying to break this goddamn window open, you think you could—"

The window pane snapped free and shattered as it slammed up into the wall above it. Both men regarded the ruined glass.

"Ah," said Edgar. "Ladies first?"

Jimmy made a little frustrated gesture for Edgar to go ahead, not quite sure if pushing through first now would actually made him a lady or what. That little snotty voice that makes boys in kindergarten eat worms on a dare was telling him not to risk it.

"Chivalry is alive and well, I see."

Edgar reached up and pulled himself through the opening in one smooth wriggle. How that much full grown man got through in so little time was enough to boggle the imagination.

"It's a bit dreary in here," Edgar said, his neat leather shoes tapping rubber soles against the discolored carpet. "I would have hated to work in the place. Pass up our bags, would you please."

Jimmy swung their various satchels and packs up through the opening. They had some serious heft to them, especially the ones Edgar had been carrying—if there had been a hammer and a crowbar in there, he had no fucking idea what else the guy might have packed away.

The window was about chest level with him, when he reached out and put his hands on the sill. Despite a rigorous life of violence and mayhem, the extent of his upper body strength was largely limited to swinging sharp objects and lifting cans of beer. He'd never been much good at pull-ups, even back when he was in gym class regularly.

On the other hand, if Vargas could do it then it couldn't be too hard.

Jimmy swung himself up and promptly fell back down. A grand struggle ensued.

Edgar, his hands in his pockets, watched the attempt with a quirked lip. "Would you like a hand?"

"No," Jimmy snapped.

"Are you sure? I'm not particularly busy up here."

"_No_."

"Suit your—oh."

Jimmy with his elbow digging into the carpet tried to get a decent look around the room, and then slipped back down a few crucial inches. "What?"

"Well," Edgar replied, lowly, "if a captain goes down with his ship, I guess it goes to reason that a director goes down with his company, doesn't it."

"What?"

"Somebody never left the building," Edgar informed him. "Could you perhaps pull your act together sooner rather than later? Now would be a stunning time for the cavalry to come racing in."

Jimmy grunted irritably and did his best to hook a boot around the corner of the window.

"Oh," Edgar said. "He spotted me."

"That means he spotted me too," Jimmy hissed.

"Yes," Edgar said.

"Mother _fuck_."

Edgar backed up—efficient, tidy steps—against the wall beside the shattered windowpane. Jimmy managed to jerk himself higher into a more stable position, which afforded him the comforting sight of a pitted and browning walker making its speedy way down the hall, just as it broke into a grotesque lope across the carpeting—

There was a nearly deafening bang, and its dissipated face exploded in half-congealed brownish ooze.

Jimmy looked up, frozen with just his one leg hung off the edge of the sill. Edgar's pistol glinted dim gray in his hands.

"It appears," the older man noted offhandedly, after an echoing moment, "that I, in fact, _could_."

And although he didn't realize it at the time, it was in that exact second that Jimmy fell in love.


End file.
